Andrew Revkin has been reporting on climate change for nearly 20 years, the last 11 as an environmental reporter at the New York Times, and his work has taken him to the ends of the earth. Tuesday evening, Revkin will be at the College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor giving a talk titled “The Daily Planet: A Journalist’s Search for Sustainability, from the Amazon to the Arctic.”

Reporting on climate change is challenging, Revkin said in a recent phone interview. He said many reporters and editors tend to get caught in one of two traps. One is the trap of balancing a story with dueling doctorates: giving equal weight to conflicting opinions of climate change even when those challenging the science are a tiny minority. Recently, Revkin said, many reporters have fallen into the opposite trap: ignoring scientific uncertainties and sensationalizing climate change by linking it directly to every extreme weather event, for example.

Revkin avoids hype in “The North Pole Was Here” (Kingfisher, 2006, $15.95), his new book for younger readers. The book covers the science of climate change from the vantage of a scientific expedition he accompanied to the North Pole. (The title refers to the wandering Arctic ice cap – post a flag at the pole one day and it may be many yards away the next.)

There’s a reason the book focuses on the Arctic. “One thing that physics and geoscience has shown pretty clearly is that a little global warming goes a long way in the Arctic,” said Revkin. “There are natural mechanisms in the Arctic that amplify warming.” One example is that warming accelerates as sea ice, which reflects solar energy back into space, is replaced by open water, which absorbs the sun’s energy. “There’s been a big reduction, particularly in the summers, of the extent of the sea ice up there in recent decades,” he said. “So it kind of builds on itself.”

Revkin said his first lengthy article about climate change appeared in Discover Magazine in 1988 and, though science has filled in many gaps since then, the bones of the story remain the same. “The basic questions haven’t changed. The debate is still about how much warming is too much,” he said. “And no one disputes the physics that greenhouse gases make the earth warmer than it would otherwise be, and we are adding more to the atmosphere.”

University of Maine professor Joseph Kelley, a marine geologist and member of the university’s Climate Change Institute, agreed. “Climate is definitely changing, I don’t think there’s any dispute among people in the field,” Kelley said Wednesday. “It’s getting warmer. The degree to which people are contributing to warming can be argued, but the obvious correlation between us and CO2 is hard to get around.”

Scientists may agree on the basics of climate change, but politicians don’t. In the past two years Revkin has broken stories about White House political appointees trying to muzzle government scientists such as NASA climate expert James Hansen.

Politics aside, Revkin said this is a remarkable time to be covering the environment. “We are at this momentous juncture as a species,” he said. “We’ve spent literally a million years or more as a purely local organism dealing with the environment locally – harvesting, exploiting, polluting and cleaning up locally. And just now, just these past few decades, science has revealed that we have become a global player.”

From the Amazon to the Arctic

What: Environmental journalist Andrew Revkin speaks about “The Daily Planet: A Journalist’s Search for Sustainability, from the Amazon to the Arctic.”

When: 6 p.m., Tuesday, Aug. 15

Where: Gates Center, College of the Atlantic, Bar Harbor

Contact: 288-5015

Andrew Revkin will sign copies of his new book at Port in a Storm bookstore in Somesville on Aug. 17 from 3 to 5 p.m. Murray Carpenter is a freelance journalist in Belfast. He can be reached at Fishhawk2@adelphia.net.